


True Disciplines of the Wars

by Lilliburlero



Category: Henry V - Shakespeare
Genre: Anglo-Welsh Relations, Class Difference, Cultural Differences, Established Relationship, F/M, M/M, Marriage, Multi, POV Third Person, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Present Tense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-08
Updated: 2013-12-08
Packaged: 2018-01-04 00:16:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1074735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A partial resolution to the hospitality issue sketched in <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/1066242">A Welsh Correction</a>.</p><p>*</p><p>Content advisory: references to homophobia, descriptions of post-traumatic stress.</p>
            </blockquote>





	True Disciplines of the Wars

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [angevin2](http://archiveofourown.org/users/angevin2/pseuds/angevin2) for beta-reading.

By the middle of Advent, Nan’s patience is wearing thin.  She’d wanted to bring Hugh home to keep Christmas, but the steady sleet and mizzle has made the nearest road from Canterbury an unlikely proposition.  Better he stay with his aunt and uncle there than risk getting trapped out here and be unable to return to school.  Nan is proud of her clever son, though she’s not sure how she feels about him entering the Church, and neither is his father. It is very wicked to hope he won’t have a vocation, she tells herself, and indeed they don’t quite hope that, but she sometimes feels they don’t quite hope fervently enough that he _does_ have one, either.   

Nan’s disappointment turns to a pallid sort of relief as the mizzle is more and more often diversified by lashing downpours and hail.  She wouldn’t want to bring a gentle eleven-year-old boy into this Bedlam, and is glad too that the house is less populated than it would be at any other season.  The cowman lives out, and so there are only the two maids, Bet and Malkin, steady war-widows in their forties, and the boy Adam, who sleeps in the stable-loft and is still so perpetually agog at serving a family that harbours not one but _two_ of King Henry’s happy seven thousand that he barely notices their very salient unhappiness.  It wouldn’t be so bad if they could somehow stagger their fits so there was only one to cope with at a time—Nan has heard that women who live together have their courses all at once, she’s not sure she believes it, for between aunts and cousins and servants there had seldom been fewer than a dozen women of childbearing age in her guardian’s house and they never managed it, perhaps it’s just nuns, God might arrange that all right, it makes sense—anyway, the devils who have taken her menfolk delight in and feed upon each other’s company.

Someone who did not have to live with it might find it interesting: her phlegmatic, easy-going husband becomes twitchy and touchy, suddenly unable to sit still, abusing the fixtures and movables of the house to disastrous effect, because Tom Gower is six foot two inches tall and though he directs the lines now rather than shooting in them he retains the strength to pull a war-bow, which is something like lifting a weight as heavy as Nan herself with one hand, and _repeat_ and _repeat_ and _repeat_ and _repeat_ until enough Frenchmen are dead to go in with pole-axe and falchion, or the arrows run out (it’s nearly always the arrows run out, Tom says, but you go in anyway).  Fluellen is physically powerful, but his training was with gentlemanly weapons, so even he cannot draw Tom’s bow properly.  That same volatile Welshman, meanwhile, sits immobile and silent in the chimney-corner. Nan hasn’t seen him as much as get up to piss since before noon yesterday, but no wonder, as he takes no food and just enough drink for life.  Sometimes Cissy escapes her mother’s or the servants’ eyes long enough to crawl into his lap, and he wordlessly accepts the bulk (four-year-old Cecily takes after her father, as short, rotund Hugh favours Nan) but she soon gets bored when no stories or songs are forthcoming, and slithers away again.

Nan’s eyes swim, and her head.  At dusk, the unsettling thoughts come, gibbering like imps: that this is her fault, because she winked at what they did, went to _Mass_ so she could wink at it—God, how many times must she have stood and knelt and stood, serenely wallowing in the holy incomprehensibilities, a whited tomb.  She had not thought it was so very bad a sin—no worse than seducing a girl, less bad maybe, because no-one’s prospects are ruined by it.  She once heard a friar preach against it in Canterbury, and though it was a very lurid sermon felt little moved, for the flabby toads and poison adders he described are nothing like her Tom, who even in his despondency and anger is honest of mind and sound of body.  They must not do the worst things, at any rate.  And she thought she had been doing right, making Tom happy.  She always swore she wouldn’t be jealous—most men stumbled, and he was bound to, lusty, outgoing, so often far from home.  She would be dignified, not like some.  She had not, it was true, expected the form his fall took, nor that she herself would find it so comely.  Nan’s high opinion of Fluellen’s curious, feline looks and soft, high-pitched voice is not something she would ever divulge to her stentorian, conventionally handsome husband, but at first it delighted her and now it torments her, that it is something they share.

She remembers her first sight of him, through tears of relief that Tom had made it, a compact block of a man, half a foot shorter than Tom, his small chaperon—really just a hood turned about, like men used to wear when Nan was a little girl—swept off to reveal unfashionably long dark curls caught in a pigtail in his nape, narrow black eyes above high cheekbones, flattish nose, broad, thin, mobile lips in a sharply tapering stubbled jaw.  He made a courtesy so deep she thought he might be making game of her, a yeoman centenar’s wife, true, but that was still no more than an archer’s woman, but he was not, and anyway, the alien rhythms of his speech made everything he said sound like play.  For the first few days she had to suppress giggles before she could make polite response to his intricate conversation, at which he turned on her grave, glittering eyes.  Ciss, usually shy, and wary of the father she only dimly remembered, was at Fluellen’s knee in an instant, vouchsafing a flood of classified information about her toys, the wounds incurred in the course of stitching her sampler, and the hollow oak beyond the First Field, at present the outer limit of her independent existence.  Nan, thinking to shoot Tom a reassuring glance at this potentially embarrassing circumstance, saw her husband’s face already affectionately soft and mild.  It was not then, she thought, that she had realised they were lovers; there had not been a _moment_ of realisation, but a slow-growing conviction, and it had all been bathed in a russet light like harvest sunsets (though harvest was two months and more gone). The joy of Tom’s return uninjured, winter leisure, plenty of money (for though they had not been able to claim all the prizes they might have hoped for—Fluellen cleared his throat, but Nan shook her head, it was all right, she knew what that meant, she pitied French widows and orphans, but she knew what it would mean for Tom to be taken also, no ransoms for archers—there had been _some_ ): it had been like falling in love all over again, a glorious unsteady complicity.  But the glow had been the fires of hell all along, and now it was turned to cold were-light.

Tom sleeps badly, but Fluellen does not sleep at all. Tom wakes choking, unable to stop coughing, so Nan lights a dip, creeps out of the bedchamber and across the hall to the kitchen, meaning to wake Malkin and ask her to make a posset. Fluellen sits fully dressed in his customary place, but now tense and alert to the flicker of light, her small scuffle, fingering the hilt of his dagger.

‘I’m sorry.  Did Tom’s coughing wake you?’

‘No. I wasn’t asleep.’

‘You should try, if I may say so.’

‘You may say so, madam. It is good advice.’ He inclines his head with a touch of his typical ironic courtesy. ‘But what for?’

‘Men go mad without sleep.’

‘Then I have nothing to fear if I sleep or no, Mistress Gower.’

‘Don’t say that!’ She makes the sign of the cross. Embarrassed that the gesture seemed more to confirm than to ward against the threat, she adds, ‘And—and you should call me Nan.  I’m your sister, as good as.’  She never calls him by his given name.  Tom does, but Tom takes many liberties that she should like—she has never quite come as close to articulating that thought as she does now, but she still holds it at bay.

‘My sister.’  His lips stretch back over yellowed, well-preserved teeth, and he wheezes mirthlessly.  Suddenly indignant—how dare he, gentleman or no gentleman, he’s only a bloody Welshman, and she’s accepted him, quieted the curiosity of the village and stayed Father Ralph’s insinuations, imperilled her very _soul_ for him to slake his unnatural desires upon _her_ man, how many blood sisters would do as much?—she is about to expostulate when the candlelight glints on tears in the corner of his eye.

‘Look, don’t—’ she puts down the candle and squats beside him, her hand on his knee.  He envelops it in his own hard paw, and she can’t help but shiver.

‘Are you cold, _fach_?’

‘No—well, yes. But that wasn’t why I shivered.’  There, it was not only thought, but said.  He doesn’t let go; but splays his other hand across his face, wipes his eyes between thumb and index finger.

‘Oh. I think I see.’  His lips twitch.  ‘I fear this is all very much contrary to the ancient laws and discipline of war, Mis—Nan.’

‘You’re not at the wars now—Griffith.’

His nostrils flare and she supposes she must’ve got one of the improbable Welsh sounds wrong.

‘I keep my discipline off the field as well.’  

She frowns. ‘Would—would you like to be back?’ she ventures. ‘I mean, all men together sort of thing?’

‘War is very terrible.  But I suppose it is a good occupation for men of my mould.  The only one maybe. I would like to study the arts of peace—but war has made me now what I am.’

Nan is nonplussed.  She is not used to double speech—tact, leaving certain things unsaid, yes, but—and she thinks she must have got this all wrong.

‘Well, I suppose I must fetch Tom his posset.’  She lights a candle for him and replaces her guttering dip with another.

She doesn’t wake Malkin or Bet, tapping ale, pouring milk and assembling the spices herself, carrying the pot to heat over the hall fire rather than taking it across the passage to the kitchen.  Fluellen makes no attempt to talk.  No part of Nan’s education—which was better than might have been expected, given the crowded and sometimes chaotic household she’d married out of at sixteen; she can do several sorts of fine as well as plain work, read a few words, sign her name and keep an account—has however prepared her for conversation with her husband’s lover, to whom she has just made a foolish admission of unreciprocated partiality, so she is mute too. They hear Tom’s muffled hacking from the bedroom, but if he is wondering where his wife has gone, who slipped out only to give an order to the maid, he does not come looking for her. It seems like it will never come to the boil, and then it does, explosively, just as she has lapsed into a very Fluellen-like brown study, and despite pulling her sleeve down over it she scorches her palm on the racken.  He holds out his hand, she, hesitatingly, puts hers in it, and he presses his lips to the burn, as if she were Cissy’s age.  But also, not. Lovers kiss palms. She can’t bear it, she really can’t, it is too much.  She pulls away with a small cry. 

‘Very well, _cariad_.’  It’s exactly what he says to Ciss when she announces she’s going to marry him when she grows up.  But also, not.  

To cover her confusion, she ladles posset into two of the three cups.

‘Here,’ she says, ‘will you take it to him?’

The words are not out of her mouth before the monstrous impropriety of asking a gentleman guest to fetch and carry for his military equal and social inferior rushes in upon her—and Fluellen, of all people, so mannerly, so deliberately attentive to form—if he mistakes her feebly improvised stratagem—

But he does not.

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘yes I will yes.’ 

**Author's Note:**

> Hugh Gower is imagined attending the monastery school that will after the Reformation become the King's School Canterbury, and the Gower farmhouse as a modest single-storey version of the standard south-eastern English hall house on about 40 acres.
> 
> The hot-gospelling friar is probably a little before his time, but not so much I felt compelled to cut him.


End file.
